Our customers have told us that they want to focus on building innovative solutions for their customers, and focus less on the heavy lifting of managing Kubernetes infrastructure. That is why Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) has been so popular; we remove the burden of managing Kubernetes while our customers glean the benefits.

However, not all customers choose to use Amazon EKS. For example, they may have existing infrastructure investments, data residency requirements or compliance obligations that lead them to operate Kubernetes on-premises. Customers in these situations tell us that they spend a lot of effort to track updates, figure out compatible versions of Kubernetes and the complicated matrix of underlying components, test them for compatibility, and keep pace with the Kubernetes release cadence, which can be as frequent as every three to four months. If customers are not able to maintain pace for testing and qualifying new versions, they risk breaking changes, version compatibility issues, and running unsupported versions of Kubernetes lacking critical security patches.

We have learned a lot while providing Amazon EKS at AWS and have developed a deep understanding of how to deliver Kubernetes with operational security, stability, and reliability. Today we are sharing Amazon EKS Distro, which we built using that knowledge.

EKS Distro is a distribution of the same version of Kubernetes deployed by Amazon EKS, which you can use to manually create your own Kubernetes clusters anywhere you choose. EKS Distro provides the installable builds and code of open source Kubernetes used by Amazon EKS, including the dependencies and AWS-maintained patches. Using a choice of cluster creation and management tooling, you can create EKS Distro clusters in AWS on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), in other clouds, and on your on-premises hardware.

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